A long time ago I blogged on how you can use the PostgreSQL development snapshots to test new PostgreSQL features before alpha/beta/rc releases are officially released. Another way to do this is to use git to get the latest sources and build PostgreSQL from there. Everything which was committed will be available to test. Btw: A great way to stay up to date is to subscribe to the mailing list just referenced. You’ll get a mail for each commit that happened, maybe one of those is getting your attention?

To start you’ll obviously need git. For distributions using yum this is just a matter of:

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [pg960final] sudo yum install git

For systems using apt use:

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [pg960final] sudo apt-get install git

Depending on how you want to configure PostgreSQL you’ll need some development packages as well. For yum based systems this is a good starting point:

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [pg960final] sudo yum install -y gcc openldap-devel python-devel readline-devel redhat-lsb bison flex perl-ExtUtils-Embed zlib-devel crypto-utils openssl-devel pam-devel libxml2-devel libxslt-devel tcl tcl-devel openssh-clients bzip2 net-tools wget screen ksh unzip

For apt based systems you might want to start with this:

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [pg960final] sudo apt-get install libldap2-dev libpython-dev libreadline-dev libssl-dev bison flex libghc-zlib-dev libcrypto++-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev tcl tclcl-dev bzip2 wget screen ksh libpam0g-dev libperl-dev make unzip libpam0g-dev tcl-dev python

Not all of those packages are required, they just reflect what we usually install before building PostgreSQL from source. Of course you should adjust this and remove packages that are not required for what you plan to do.

How do you then get the latest PostgreSQL sources? Quite easy, it is documented in the PostgreSQL wiki:

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [pg960final] mkdir IwantToTest
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/ [pg960final] cd IwantToTest/
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/ [pg960final] git clone git://git.postgresql.org/git/postgresql.git

The result should look similar to this:

Cloning into 'postgresql'...
remote: Counting objects: 629074, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (95148/95148), done.
remote: Total 629074 (delta 534080), reused 626282 (delta 531478)
Receiving objects: 100% (629074/629074), 184.31 MiB | 26.40 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (534080/534080), done.

From now on you have the complete PostgreSQL sources locally available.

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/ [pg960final] cd postgresql/; ls
aclocal.m4  config  configure  configure.in  contrib  COPYRIGHT  doc  GNUmakefile.in  HISTORY  Makefile  README  README.git  src

Ready to test? Yes, but what? One possible way to start is asking git for what was committed recently:

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/ [pg960final] git log
commit 0de791ed760614991e7cb8a78fddd6874ea6919d
Author: Peter Eisentraut [email protected]
Date:   Wed May 3 21:25:01 2017 -0400

    Fix cursor_to_xml in tableforest false mode
    
    It only produced  elements but no wrapping table element.
    
    By contrast, cursor_to_xmlschema produced a schema that is now correct
    but did not previously match the XML data produced by cursor_to_xml.
    
    In passing, also fix a minor misunderstanding about moving cursors in
    the tests related to this.
    
    Reported-by: [email protected]
    Based-on-patch-by: Thomas Munro [email protected]
...

Usually you can find a link to the discussion in the commit message so can you read through the history of a specific commit. Another way is to read the development documentation or the upcoming release notes once available.

All you need to do then is to build PostgreSQL:

postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/ [pg960final] ./configure
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/ [pg960final] make all
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/ [pg960final] sudo make install
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/ [pg960final] cd contrib
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/contrib/ [pg960final] make all
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/contrib/ [pg960final] sudo make install
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/contrib/ [pg960final] /usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb -D /var/tmp/test
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/contrib/ [pg960final] /usr/local/pgsql/bin/pg_ctl -D /var/tmp/test start
postgres@pgbox:/home/postgres/IwantToTest/postgresql/contrib/ [pg960final] /usr/local/pgsql/bin/psql postgres
psql (10devel)
Type "help" for help.

pgbox/postgres MASTER (postgres@5432) # 

Happy testing …